Cotton Acres for 2025: It’s Complicated

I’m not sure when Cotton Grower got into the business of prognosticating anticipated cotton acreage for the coming year as part of our January issue. It was definitely before my time in the editor’s chair (thanks, everybody). But it’s an intriguing exercise that generally ends up being equal parts frustrating and surprisingly rewarding.

It’s akin to creating something tangible from an incomplete data set. I’m not sure any amount of AI calculus could be helpful. So once again, we’ll stick our necks out and give it our best shot, because someone has to be the acreage bell cow before USDA and the National Cotton Council Cotton Acres for 2025 reveal their more scientific-based projections in February and March.  

These acreage projections are based on input and conversations with multiple stakeholders in the cotton industry — our readers, state cotton specialists, economists, and others related to U.S. cotton. It’s nothing more than a reporting job with math involved, and we try to do our best with the information we get.  

That said — and based on the information in hand as we went to press in early December – U.S. cotton growers are projected to plant a total (upland and Pima) of 11.04 million acres in 2025. That’s a decrease of roughly 5.4% from USDA’s final reported 2024 plantings of 11.7 million acres.